What's your griefstyle? What do you do to mourn those people, animals, relationships, experiences and situations that you know or believe you can no longer enjoy?

Maybe you cry and mope in a corner. Maybe you scream in anger and frustration. Maybe you turn to booze, chocolate or other substances, legal or otherwise. Maybe you seek solace in your friends or your faith community, or in nature, music, journalling or the arts. I suppose any of these things can be helpful, to varying degrees, at various times in one's life, depending on who you are and what you're all about.

How about a wind phone?There's already one that I know of in the Outaouais:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/chelsea-wind-phone-1.6621595

Soon there will be another one more centrally located right in Ottawa, in a park for cancer patients, cancer survivors and their loved ones:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-100-ottawa-morning/clip/15991698-how-wind-phone-help-people-connect-loved-ones

The basic idea is simple: a public, landline-type telephone that's not connected. But you can still lift up the receiver, dial or press numbers on a keypad, and talk to whomever you wish to imagine being at the other end.

The most famous wind phone in the world and the one that's generally credited as being the original, was installed in March 2011 at the foot of Kujira-yama (Mountain of the Whale) just outside of Otsuchi Japan, in the wake of the disastrous tsunamis in that area:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/wind-telephone

Fast forward nine years. I think we all know what happened in March 2020, don't we?
Almost everyone was grieving. If they weren't actually grieving for people who had died or who were seriously ill, they were at the very least grieving for the finer things and even routine aspects of life that they could no longer enjoy. And it was difficult to properly process that grief. Drive-through funerals? Memorial services via Zoom? They're not for everyone.

Libraries were closed too. But I ordered quite a few books online. Including Laura Imai Messina's book The Phone Box at the Edge of the World, published by Manilla Press, in association with Goldsboro Books, in July 2020. It's fiction, but inspired by the Japanese wind phone installed in 2011. I found it extremely moving, even though inspirational-type literature is not normally my thing. It's not Pollyannish at all, but sort of quietly poignant. It has stayed with me.

Then last summer in Ireland, I bought and read Sorry for Your Trouble: The Irish Way of Death, by Ann Marie Hourihane (c2021). That one's non-fiction but highly readable; anecdotes about death, dying and funeral rites, where the author's sly Irish humour shows through on every page.

Finally, just recently, I read another work of fiction that I bought through Goldsboro Books, End of Story by Louise Swanson (who also writes as Louise Beech). It's mostly set in the year 2035, in a world where fiction is completely banned and those who had made a living in the arts are retrained for other things. Our heroine, Fern Dostoy, had been a best-selling author of a highly influential, prize-winning book. Reading bedtime stories to your kids is banned. The only bookstore in town now sells only non-fiction and one day a month is an amnesty day when people can turn in any works of fiction they may still have in their possession.

It's a powerful story about guilt and grief, especially women's guilt and grief. In fact, it is divided into five sections, each for one of the (supposed) five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. There's a bit of a twist towards the end, which I almost dismissed as a cop-out; but I read on and was glad I did because the various strands of the storyline were brought to what I felt was a satisfying conclusion.

So anyway, would I use a wind phone? Probably not, but I think the more positive outlets we have for processing life's setbacks, the better. What's MY griefstyle? I'm still trying to figure that out!
It seems that young people do everything on their portable phones these days: Talk, text, take pictures, play games, make contactless payments and do their banking... amongst other things. Many older people do those things too, the main difference being that they remember the days when your typical telephone was stuck to the wall or located in a moderately private and soundproof box on a street corner or in the lobby of a public building.

So I was quite intrigued by the premise of the book I'm currently reading, The Phone Box at the Edge of the World, by Laura Imai Messina. It's a novel with fictional characters but the titular phone box actually exists, in a garden in Japan. And the kicker is: the phone (known as the "wind phone") is not hooked up. You can still lift the receiver and dial numbers, but there's no one at the other end. Or rather, the person at the other end is whoever you want it to be.

People go here to talk to those they have lost. In many cases, the people have died. Sometimes they are simply missing or far away, and the caller may not even know if they are dead or alive. It's a way of handling grief and loss in a private forum. You can say all the things you couldn't say before, or "tell" the person how things are going now and what you hope to do tomorrow or next year or ten years from now.

The two main characters in the novel, both in their thirties, have both lost people close to them in a major tsunami that occurred in the area in 2011. Yui has lost her young daughter and her mother; Takeshi has lost his wife, the mother of their daughter Hana, who has stopped speaking as a result of the tragedy. Yui and Takeshi meet at Bell Gardia, site of the wind phone and get to know each other better. Eventually they start to travel from Tokyo to Bell Gardia together on their monthly visits there. A relationship develops between them, based on their shared experience of loss.

In many ways, this novel could not have appeared at a better time. The wind phone offers the ultimate in physical distancing. It's also electronic distancing! The one thing it probably isn't? I'd say emotional distancing. The phone instead offers a kind of emotional, spiritual, imaginative and cathartic proximity to those we've lost and in the process, gives us better insight into our own psyche and our interactions with those who are still with us.

It's really not that different from visiting graveyards or setting up roadside memorials like ghost bikes. Some would say it's not so different from praying or attending confession or making a pilgrimage of any kind. Or daydreaming or meditating. Or any kind of creative expression.

During a pandemic, with traditional funerals and memorial services often out of the question and drive-in or drive-by events not cutting it for many survivors of trauma and loss, something like this could be restorative to the heart and soul.

For more information on the real life site, see:

http://bell-gardia.jp/the-phone-of-the-wind/
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